


though they die early

by ataxophilia



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2015-05-19
Packaged: 2018-03-31 08:28:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3970993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ataxophilia/pseuds/ataxophilia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“He was dead when they got there, Matt, I’m so sorry.”</p>
<p>Foggy dies. Matt struggles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	though they die early

**Author's Note:**

> This is very decidedly Keightee's fault, because her favourite thing to do is ask me to write deathfic, and also because it was her birthday yesterday, and I'm the kind of person who writes about death for birthdays now. 
> 
> Unbeta'd, please point out any errors as per usual. 
> 
> Warning for, well, major character death, and also a brief description of violence.

Matt doesn’t _know_ , is the thing.

It’s not the worst thing, not by a long shot, but it feels like the biggest thing when he gets the call, a little after four in the afternoon, body aching with bruises from three nights ago, Karen humming to herself in the other room. His phone announces the call in its familiar tinny voice – _Mrs Nelson_ , which is enough to put him on edge before he even picks up, because while Foggy’s mother loves him like a second son the only time she’s ever called him outside of holidays was when Foggy was in a car accident and spent a week in hospital.

The hitch in her voice when she says his name only confirms what he’d feared, but even then he doesn’t _know_. His stomach sinks, his mind flashing to all the people who could have figured him out, learnt enough to go after Foggy, but he doesn’t leap straight to the worst.

He has Foggy to thank for that, he supposes. Foggy and Karen and their endless refusal to give up on hope.

But right now, with Foggy’s mother stumbling through the news over the phone, _Foggy didn’t make it home last night_ , the words thick and messy from her tears, Matt doesn’t feel like thanking Foggy for anything.

“They found him behind a bar a few blocks from his apartment,” Foggy’s mother says. There’s a murmur from the background on her end, a half-swallowed sob, and then she finishes, even though Matt’s worked it out now, now he _knows_ ; “He was dead when they got there, Matt, I’m so sorry.”

Foggy’s father takes over, telling Matt the details they’d been given in a steady voice, the rough date for the funeral. Matt makes the appropriate noises, nodding along even though no one can see him, but nothing has really sunk in since _he was dead_. He thinks maybe Foggy’s father knows that, because he doesn’t ask anything, not even whether Matt will be okay, just says, “We’ll be here if you need us, Matt,” and hangs up after Matt gets out an affirmative.

Matt takes three deep breaths, fingers clenching and unclenching around his phone, and then hurls the thing at the wall.

“What,” Karen starts, and then her heels are clicking against the floorboards of the office and she’s pulling Matt’s door open. Matt doesn’t know what he looks like, but he imagines it must be bad, because he feels like every muscle in his body is tensed to breaking point, and because Karen doesn’t finish her question, just inhales sharply and then holds her breath.

“Sorry,” Matt says automatically, hand still folding itself into a fist over and over on his thigh. Karen makes an aborted noise, her worry kicking her heartbeat up a few notches, and Matt exhales, long and slow. “Sorry,” he says again, forcing his hand to relax and running it over the lower half of his face. “Shit, Karen, I’m sorry.”

That shakes Karen awake, and Matt listens as her footsteps move across the room to where his phone hit the wall. “It’s just a phone,” she tells him. Her tone tells Matt that she knows this is about more than a phone, but she’s like Matt was before the call, she doesn’t _know_.

Matt thinks back to the murder trials he’s sat in on, the witnesses teary at the stand as they informed the jury that they just _knew_ , in the pit of their stomachs, that something had happened.

He wonders whether they were all lying, or whether he’s just been oblivious, ignoring the inevitable fallout waiting for him at the end of the road he’s taken.

“Karen,” he says, and it comes out more broken than he’d expected, cracked down the middle. He feels Karen’s eyes on him, worried again. She’s still on the other side of the room. Part of him wants to keep her over there, but more of him knows that isn’t fair to her.

He takes another deep breath.

“Karen, you need to— I think you should sit down.”

\---

Karen cries once he’s told her. She presses one hand to her mouth like it’ll hold the sobs in and tangles the other with Matt’s fingers like it’ll hold her together, and she _cries_ , her whole body heaving with the force of it.

Normally, Matt is good with crying people. It’s another one of those things Foggy always held against him – _everyone else in the world freaks out when someone starting crying on them but you’re actually fucking_ okay _with it_ – but not really, because it meant Foggy could pass off sobbing clients without feeling guilty.

Only, not anymore. And Matt’s brain sticks on that, on Foggy not sheepishly nudging clients in Matt’s direction because Foggy’s _dead_ , and on the fact that Karen’s crying because _Foggy’s_ _dead_ , so instead of doing anything to comfort Karen he just sits there, one hand holding Karen’s and the other clenched over his leg again.

“Did they,” Karen starts, and Matt hears the way her breath gets stuck in her throat, another sob catching it and clinging tightly. It brings him back enough that he squeezes his fingers around Karen’s. She makes a shaky, gasping noise that he thinks might be her forcing a laugh because he won’t see a smile, and then finishes, “Did they say why?”

Matt’s inhale shudders through him. Foggy’s father didn’t say. He gave Matt the barebones of the police report so far, the bruises, the broken ribs, the wound to the head that they think was probably the fatal blow, but he didn’t mention a possible motive. Maybe the police don’t have one yet. Maybe they think it was just a random beating, one of those wrong place wrong time things.

Matt knows. This time he does know, like all the clients on the stands. It’s sitting tight and heavy in his guts, this glaring, leaden _knowing_ that he can’t stop wanting to claw at.

Foggy died because of _him_.

It takes him a long beat to remember that Karen doesn’t know anything about Daredevil, _can’t_ know anything about Daredevil, so she can’t know this, either, but if he pauses for too long before he shakes his head she doesn’t seem to notice.

“Are you—what—oh,” she stumbles, her nails digging into the back of Matt’s hand. “Oh, God, Matt, _God_.” She’s not sobbing anymore but Matt thinks she might still be crying. Her voice sounds wet, and her fingers are trembling ever so slightly where they’re wound up in his.

“Hey,” Matt says, finally, and his voice feels rusty even though it’s only been a few minutes since he last spoke. Karen’s fingers keep shaking, her heartbeat frantic enough that Matt can almost taste it, and there’s nothing he can do to bring Foggy back, nothing he can to make this right again, but he can extract his hand from hers and use it to pull her in close, tuck her face against his shoulder and hold her as the sobs tear their way back up her throat. “Hey, okay, breathe, Karen, you have to breathe, come on.”

Karen’s shoulders heave under his arm, and she’s halfway between laughing and crying, quiet, hysterical noises spilling out between them, but she breathes with him, slow, steady breaths, her hand coming up to grip his jacket.

“What are we going to do?” she asks, once her body has stopped shaking so violently. She keeps her face pressed against Matt.

Matt swallows. They’ll have to do something, he knows – do countless things, keep carrying on with their lives even though something huge and necessary has been ripped out of them – but Matt doesn’t want to.

“I don’t know,” he says, quietly, truthfully.

Karen makes her gasping, laughing sound again, soft and sad and little. “No,” she says, and somehow, after that, there’s nothing else to say.

\---

The whole of Matt’s body burns with the urge to hit something.

He’s on the roof, in his red mask and his red suit, the whole city spread out before him, a mess of sounds and smells and fighting, and he can hear where it might need him, but it feels wrong, tilted off-centre, and he can’t make himself move.

It takes a while to work out that what’s wrong is him.

Because he’s _angry_. And he’s been angry before, he’s fought angry before, he’s used being angry to push himself to the edge over and over again, but it’s never been this raw, painful kind of angry, like claws digging into his chest, trying to tear out his heart.

Somewhere to his east (eight blocks, and another two to his north) there’s a low, choked-off shout. Another man snarls something in a language Matt doesn’t know, something Eastern European, maybe, and then there’s the solid sound of a fist meeting flesh, the _thud_ of a body dropping down onto its knees.

It’s so easy to imagine Foggy’s voice in place of the first shout. Matt closes his eyes, tries to drown it out, but the man calls out again, and it’s _Foggy_ , it’s Foggy calling for help, it’s Foggy trying to catch his breath after his lungs are punched empty, it’s Foggy slumping to the pavement, still muttering half-formed pleas.

The sting of tears builds without Matt’s permission, his eyes filling up, his breath coming uneven and ragged. The second man spits out another sentence that Matt can’t understand and then leaves, walks out into the street and disappears into the crowd. Matt could follow him, could track the tread of his footsteps until he was alone and then beat him bloody, but he lets him go.

It wouldn’t bring Foggy back, and somehow that makes it seem pointless.

Instead, he picks his way to a rooftop near the first guy and pulls out his burner phone to call for an ambulance.

He waits until the paramedics arrive, all his focus narrowed down to the guy’s heartbeat, his breathing. Nobody else comes near the alley.

Nobody came for Foggy, either, not even Matt, who should have _heard_. Matt’s read the autopsy report in full now, he knows that Foggy’s head wound wouldn’t have killed him if someone had found him in time. If Matt had _known_ , if he’d just been listening, he could have been there. Even if he hadn’t been able to stop the beating he could have called for help, could have got Foggy to a hospital.

Foggy could have been _saved_ so many times, Matt knows, and at every single one of them Matt failed.

\---

He shows up to the funeral with bloody knuckles.

He doesn’t mean to – after the paramedics left he’d turned to go home – but the anger was all still there, too bright under his skin, so he’d dropped into the alley instead, slammed his knuckles into the wall, and then done it again, and again, until the pain thrummed louder than the rage.

Karen makes a quiet, sad noise when he opens his door to her, and then again when he picks up his cane and the state of his hands becomes impossible to miss.

“Oh, Matt,” she says, but nothing else, and Matt smiles thinly and offers her his free arm, because they both know why even if Karen doesn’t know the details.

It’s an uncomfortably warm day. They walk to the funeral home anyway, Karen’s arm curled around Matt’s the whole way, the both of them silent. Matt is speaking at the funeral, a reading from the book of the Wisdom of Solomon, _but the righteous, though they die early, will be at rest_. Foggy’s mother cried when he asked, pressing an unsteady hand to Matt’s forearm, and then Matt cried when she told him they already had a slot for him, just after Foggy’s oldest sister.

He cries again when he reads the scripture, _being perfected in a short time, they fulfilled long years_ , and he hears the rest of the room crying with him, Karen’s quiet, shaky breath and Foggy’s mother’s sobs.

There is a gaping, unmissable hole in the room, and Matt aches with it, with the guilt, with missing Foggy, but Karen laces her fingers through his again when he sits back down, and Foggy’s family crowds around him when the service is over, and Matt feels the anger recede, just a little, the mourning creeping, cold and reassuring, into its place.

**Author's Note:**

> But the righteous, though they die early, will be at rest. For old age is not honored for length of time, or measured by number of years; but understanding is gray hair for anyone, and a blameless life is ripe old age.
> 
> Being perfected in a short time, they fulfilled long years; for their souls were pleasing to the Lord, therefore he took them quickly from the midst of wickedness. Yet peoples saw and did not understand, or take such a thing to heart, that God’s grace and mercy are with his elect, and that he watches over his holy ones.


End file.
